BUSH PREVAILS; BY SINGLE VOTE, JUSTICES END RECOUNT, BLOCKING GORE AFTER 5-WEEK STRUGGLE

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The Supreme Court effectively handed the presidential election to George W. Bush tonight, overturning the Florida Supreme Court and ruling by a vote of 5 to 4 that there could be no further counting of Florida's disputed presidential votes.

The ruling came after a long and tense day of waiting at 10 p.m., just two hours before the Dec. 12 ''safe harbor'' for immunizing a state's electors from challenge in Congress was to come to an end. The unsigned majority opinion said it was the immediacy of this deadline that made it impossible to come up with a way of counting the votes that could both meet ''minimal constitutional standards'' and be accomplished within the deadline.

The five members of the majority were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

Among the four dissenters, two justices, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter, agreed with the majority that the varying standards in different Florida counties for counting the punch-card ballots presented problems of both due process and equal protection. But unlike the majority, these justices said the answer should be not to shut the recount down, but to extend it until the Dec. 18 date for the meeting of the Electoral College.

Justice Souter said that such a recount would be a ''tall order'' but that ''there is no justification for denying the state the opportunity to try to count all the disputed ballots now.'' [Text, Page A27.]

The six separate opinions, totaling 65 pages, were filled with evidence that the justices were acutely aware of the controversy the court had entered by accepting Governor Bush's appeal of last Friday's Florida Supreme Court ruling and by granting him a stay of the recount on Saturday afternoon, just hours after the vote counting had begun.

''None are more conscious of the vital limits on judicial authority than are the members of this court,'' the majority opinion said, referring to ''our unsought responsibility to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront.''

The dissenters said nearly all the objections raised by Mr. Bush were insubstantial. The court should not have reviewed either this case or the one it decided last week, they said.

Justice John Paul Stevens said the court's action ''can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.''

His dissenting opinion, also signed by Justices Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, added: ''It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.''

What the court's day and a half of deliberations yielded tonight was a messy product that bore the earmarks of a failed attempt at a compromise solution that would have permitted the vote counting to continue.

It appeared that Justices Souter and Breyer, by taking seriously the equal protection concerns that Justices Kennedy and O'Connor had raised at the argument, had tried to persuade them that those concerns could be addressed in a remedy that would permit the disputed votes to be counted.

Justices O'Connor and Kennedy were the only justices whose names did not appear separately on any opinion, indicating that one or both of them wrote the court's unsigned majority opinion, labelled only ''per curiam,'' or ''by the court.'' Its focus was narrow, limited to the ballot counting process itself. The opinion objected not only to the varying standards used by different counties for determining voter intent, but to aspects of the Florida Supreme Court's order determining which ballots should be counted.

''We are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards,'' the opinion said. ''When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied.''

Three members of the majority -- the Chief Justice, and Justices Scalia and Thomas -- raised further, more basic objections to the recount and said the Florida Supreme Court had violated state law in ordering it.

The fact that Justices O'Connor and Kennedy evidently did not share these deeper concerns had offered a potential basis for a coalition between them and the dissenters. That effort apparently foundered on the two justices' conviction that the midnight deadling of Dec. 12 had to be met.

The majority said that ''substantial additional work'' was needed to undertake a constitutional recount, including not only uniform statewide standards for determining a legal vote, but also ''practical procedures to implement them'' and ''orderly judicial review of any disputed matters that might arise.'' There was no way all this could be done, the majority said.

The dissenters said the concern with Dec. 12 was misplaced. Justices Souter and Breyer offered to send the case back to the Florida courts ''with instructions to establish uniform standards for evaluating the several types of ballots that have prompted differing treatments,'' as Justice Souter described his proposed remand order. He added: ''unlike the majority, I see no warrant for this court to assume that Florida could not possibly bomply with this requirement before the date set for the meeting of electors, Dec. 18.''

Justices Stevens and Ginsburg said they did not share the view that the lack of a uniform vote-counting standard presented an equal protection problem.

In addition to joining Justice Souter's dissenting opinion, Justice Breyer wrote one of his own, signed by the three other dissenters, in which he recounted the history of the deadlocked presidential election of 1876 and of the partisan role that one Supreme Court justice, Joseph P. Bradley, played in awarding the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes.

''This history may help to explain why I think it not only legally wrong, but also most unfortunate, for the Court simply to have terminated the Florida recount,'' Justice Breyer said. He said the time problem that Florida faced was ''in significant part, a problem of the Court's own making.'' The recount was moving ahead in an ''orderly fashion,'' Justice Breyer said, when ''this court improvidently entered a stay.'' He said: ''As a result, we will never know whether the recount could have been completed.''

There was no need for the court to have involved itself in the election dispute this time, he said, adding: ''Above all, in this highly politicized matter, the appearance of a split decision runs the risk of undermining the public's confidence in the court itself. That confidence is a public treasure. It has been built slowly over many years, some of which were marked by a Civil War and the tragedy of segregation. It is a vitally necessary ingredient of any successful effort to protect basic liberty and, indeed, the rule of law itself.''

''We do risk a self-inflicted wound,'' Justice Breyer said, ''a wound that may harm not just the court, but the nation.''

Justice Ginsburg also wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by the other dissenters. Her focus was on the implications for federalism of the majority's action. ''I might join the chief justice were it my commission to interpret Florida law,'' she said, adding: ''The extraordinary setting of this case has obscured the ordinary principle that dictates its proper resolution: federal courts defer to state high courts' interpretations of their state's own law. This principle reflects the core of federalism, on which all agree.''

''Were the other members of this court as mindful as they generally are of our system of dual sovereignty,'' Justice Ginsburg concluded, ''they would affirm the judgment of the Florida Supreme Court.''

Unlike the other dissenters, who said they dissented ''respectfully,'' Justice Ginsburg said only: ''I dissent.''

Nothing about this case, Bush v. Gore, No. 00-949, was ordinary: not its context, not its acceptance over the weekend, not the enormously accelerated schedule with argument on Monday, and not the way the decision was released to the public tonight.

When the court issues an opinion, the justices ordinarily take the bench and the justice who has written for the majority gives a brief oral description of the case and the holding.

Today, after darkness fell and their work was done, the justices left the Supreme Court building individually from the underground garage, with no word to dozens of journalists from around the world who were waiting in the crowded pressroom for word as to when, or whether, a decision might come. By the time the pressroom staff passed out copies of the decision, the justices were gone.

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